[SOLVED] Cloning Data to C Drive

[GSF2021]

Perhaps this is a silly question, but I suppose I'm a silly person.

I installed a second M.2 recently, and planned on just cloning my first one + the OS to the new one.
However, boot didn't recognize that my old M.2 had windows on it, and thus wouldn't launch. I thought I could work around it by just installing Windows via. USB to my new M.2, and copying / cloning my data over afterwards.

I guess not? When I went to go clone the data using Macrium, it said that it couldn't dismount my new M2. because it was the boot drive. I figured I could just migrate the OS back to my old drive, and just start over from scratch, but it says that doing so would destroy all of my data, which defeats the point.

I'm a bit clueless. My plan right now is to unplug everything but my old drive, install windows onto it, plug my new drive back in, boot from my old one, and then migrate everything over using Macrium, but I already bugged this up once and I figured it might be a good idea to check to see if there's something easier than what I'm doing / missing something obvious.

Thanks again!

 

[Lafong]

Not quite clear what you've done or where you are now.

It would help if you posted a screen shot of Disk Management for relevant drives.

You shouldn't have to clone "data"...if you mean personal files. Those can be copied by an ordinary drag and drop.

Windows systems can be moved from this drive to that drive by cloning or by imaging. Macrium does both.

Post the screen shots if possible.

Will your PC boot now with just ONE drive connected?

 

[GSF2021]

Not quite clear what you've done or where you are now.

It would help if you posted a screen shot of Disk Management for relevant drives.

You shouldn't have to clone "data"...if you mean personal files. Those can be copied by an ordinary drag and drop.

Windows systems can be moved from this drive to that drive by cloning or by imaging. Macrium does both.

Post the screen shots if possible.

Will your PC boot now with just ONE drive connected?

Apologies for not making it more clear. I wanted to transfer over everything from my old M.2 to my new one - roughly 1TB worth of stuff. I didn't think it was recommended to just copy and paste, especially if its program files. Maybe I'm mistaken.

Right now, my new M.2 has nothing else but windows on it. My other drive still has everything else on it.

I'll post some screenshots in about 3 hours when I get home to make it less confusing, I'm currently on a laptop

Thank you again! It's really appreciated.

 

[Lafong]

Apologies for not making it more clear. I wanted to transfer over everything from my old M.2 to my new one - roughly 1TB worth of stuff. I didn't think it was recommended to just copy and paste, especially if its program files. Maybe I'm mistaken.

Right now, my new M.2 has nothing else but windows on it. My other drive still has everything else on it.

I'll post some screenshots in about 3 hours when I get home to make it less confusing, I'm currently on a laptop

Thank you again! It's really appreciated.

Ok.

You want to transfer "everything"...........not just personal data.

Two methods:

Cloning; one step process with Macrium

Imaging; two step process with Macrium.

Either can work. Either can fail. If one fails, try the other. High 90s percent success rate.

Both will totally wipe out whatever is now on the new drive.

Know what you will do if both fail.

Post the pix of the old drive.

What size is old drive and new drive?

Do you have any type of other storage, perhaps external, that has maybe 700 GB of free space? You'd need that if you wanted to use imaging.

If not, use cloning.

 

[GSF2021]

Ok.

You want to transfer "everything"...........not just personal data.

Two methods:

Cloning; one step process with Macrium

Imaging; two step process with Macrium.

Either can work. Either can fail. If one fails, try the other. High 90s percent success rate.

Both will totally wipe out whatever is now on the new drive.

Know what you will do if both fail.

Post the pix of the old drive.

What size is old drive and new drive?

Do you have any type of other storage, perhaps external, that has maybe 700 GB of free space? You'd need that if you wanted to use imaging.

If not, use cloning.

I'll upload the old drive pic when I get home as well.

For now:
Perfectly okay to wipe out everything on the new drive - nothing on it!
I have an external storage I can use that has about 2TB of space I can use for imaging if needed. There's nothing on it other than some games I can delete.

I would imagine imaging would work better if it's only one step. However, when I tried to clone from my old M.2 to my new one, it didn't work as I mentioned earlier because my new drive had windows on it, and it couldn't dismount it. Is imaging simple enough? I've never tried it before.

Thank you!

 

[Lafong]

I would imagine imaging would work better if it's only one step. However, when I tried to clone from my old M.2 to my new one, it didn't work as I mentioned earlier because my new drive had windows on it, and it couldn't dismount it. Is imaging simple enough?

Imaging is 2 steps.

Cloning is 1.

Success rate similar.

Imaging is usually regarded as "backup"...a protection against disastrous hard drive failure or corruption. Cloning most often thought of as simple transfer to different drive when all is otherwise well...no disaster.

I strongly suggest you use backups...entirely apart from your current issue of transferring to another drive.

I use imaging for backup purposes and for transfer to new drive purposes. It works for either. Cloning is not the best idea for backups.

Not sure why you had cloning trouble on your first attempt, but highly likely it was operator error. It shouldn't matter at all what is on the new drive. Your problems ("mounted") suggest the new drive may have been in use at that moment, when of course it shouldn't have....you should have been booted from the old drive only.

 

[GarrettL]

I can tell you my experience doing this over the weekend.

When I originally built the 3800x rig I put Windows on the chipset driver NVMe bus slot as it was Gen 3 SSD/NVMe PCIe 3.0. I had later on installed a Sabrent on the cpu NVMe bus. I wanted to copy the OS from the slower Gen 3 NVME to the Gen 4 NVMe.

I backed up everything first. Everything. Then removed everything off the Sabrent Gen 4.

While not free the AOMEI software worked perfectly. I was able to clone windows from the one NVMe to the other NVMe.

Shut down the pc, restart then go into the BIOS and select the proper NVME to boot from. I de-selected the old NVMe from the BOOT profile to ensure I was booting off the newly cloned drive.

Once verified I was on the new NVMe, deleted Windows from the older NVMe.

https://www.ubackup.com/clone/clone-nvme-ssd-4348.html

Sabrent does come with Acronis software that is supposed to do this but I had zero luck trying to use Acronis on Windows 11.